Of Oblivion
by Sunbird Riding Shotgun
Summary: Abby always understood Oblivion. Gibbs had taken a few crash courses in it. When they met in interrogation, NCIS investigator and prime suspect for multiple homicides, neither guessed how that shared understanding might change their lives.


**There be A/n:** Yes I know, I still need to finish up Eight Weeks and One in Four but I've had this idea stirring around in my head clogging up my brain since the beginning of writing Eight Weeks. I figured I'd write this, get it out of my system, writing the next chapter of One in Four, and work on the next chapter of Eight Weeks. To anyone who reads this and wants the next chapter but also reads Eight Weeks I suggest you skip the part where they talk about how they met Gibbs until after you've finished this story since this is my version of how they met (in all it's improbable glory) and I will spoil this story through that section of that chapter.

**Warning! A/n:** Much reference to self harm and suicide. Subtle mentions of bisexuality

Also, original doc uploaded was the wrong one. I'm fixing it now!

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Of Oblivion

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I can remember the way this started. Although my exact memory of that night has faded and mixed with nightmares, drugs, and a few too many therapists trying to tapdance around inside my head I know the exact date.

November 1st the year I was seven, though I guess it probably started October 31st. Halloween that year was a first for a lot of things for me. It was the first time my parents let me go out trick or treating with friends. It was the first time they let me stay at a friends house past eight. It was the first time I watched a horror movie.

I remember that my friend Anna had older brothers who were watching some slasher zombie flick and that they had teased us until we both swore a solemn vow to prove we weren't chicken by watching the entire movie. Their parents caught them halfway through, found Anna and I huddled together on the couch our eyes glued in terror to the screen. Her brothers were grounded for a week and had to give us all their candy but it didn't get the movie out of our heads.

That night my parents tucked me into bed like always. Anna's parents had tried to tell them what had happened but I was the only one who could translate and I was so embarrassed about breaking the no horror movie rule that I did some "creative interpreting" I didn't lie, I never lied about what was being said.

I just made it not seem so bad.

So I guess my parents didn't feel the need to do what they'd done whenever I was sick or having a bad spell of nightmares. They didn't pull out the baby monitor with the vibrating receiver that would wake them up if I started crying or vomiting or making noise of the louder sort. They kissed me good night and went to their room trusting I could cross the fifteen feet of floor from my bed to their bedroom door where the light switch was. Turning it on would bring them both jolting awake in instances.

But as I laid in bed, staring into the nothingness that lay just beyond my little night light I remembered that movie. I remembered that fear and in the mind of a seven year old I didn't know what to do besides stay in the safety of my bed and the little circle of light made by my nightlight. I didn't know what was in that darkness, lingering in the shadows under my bed, on the other side of my curtains, in the closet behind my brightly painted doors, within my now frightening collection of clown dolls uncle Larry had given me over the years, or beyond my bedroom door in the shadows of that impossible long stretch of hallway.

I remember thinking of a word in the movie I hadn't understood. _Oblivion_. I didn't know what it meant or why it seemed so significant but in the early hours of November 1st that _Oblivion_ was out there, waiting just beyond the safety of my nightlight.

And _Oblivion_ was waiting there for me.

I would never again have the courage to walk those fifteen feet. My parents would later praise me for being a big brave girl. I didn't have the heart to tell them I was too terrified of Oblivion to leave what refuge I had. Even though night after night I huddled there in terror.

As time passed I created rules. I was smart and creative and a seven year old can only live with terror so long before they start thinking of rational ways to deal with it (even if they're irrational to anyone else).

Oblivion couldn't enter light, I decided. Light destroyed Oblivion so as long as I stayed in light I would be fine. Oblivion also thrived in silence, which was my way of explaining how it had gotten such a firm foothold in my house and didn't seem strong anywhere else. It only hunted solitary prey and It only preyed on children, and when I turned ten I would simply be to old for it.

With this in mind I convinced my parents to buy me a brighter nightlight and stocked up on toys that made noises and began my love of loud music. I couldn't defeat Oblivion but I decided if I kept the laws of Oblivion in mind I could survive until I was ten and things would be okay.

Life with the threat of Oblivion became easier and by the time the next Halloween rolled around it even had became a secret brand of honor to me. Oblivion wanted me, Oblivion was after me, but I was a warrior and Oblivion would never get me.

But I kept it a secret. The only time I ever said anything about Oblivion was when I told my mom that Halloween that I wanted to be a Oblivion Knight. A Knight who Fought Oblivion.

She thought I'd seen it on a Saturday morning cartoon and didn't even bother asking for details.

That was one cool costume though.

When I turned ten I turned off my nightlight and bid Oblivion farewell, almost like an old friend who'd driven me to become stronger through adversity. In a way I guess I thought of that first night in the dark as a write of passage. As I lay in the dark, safe in my comfortable self declared knowledge that Oblivion no longer could touch me I was surprised to find how comforting that darkness was.

With my nightlight it had always felt like Oblivion was waiting to pounce. In the darkness I couldn't see anything and nothing could see me. I didn't have light to draw Oblivion's attention.

For about three years I nearly forgot about Oblivion. It was in the past and I was too old for it to attack me anymore.

I don't really remember when Oblivion first found it's way into my head. It happened so slowly that I didn't notice until it was too lodged in there to get out. It started as brief spells of melancholy, of that sluggish feeling you get when you've run too far in weather that was too hot and you just don't want to move, of being tired no matter how much I sleeped, and mood swings over simply dropping a pencil. It came with headaches, with this growing pressure inside my head I didn't understand, with noise and confusion and chaos in my mind that made coherent thought difficult at times.

By the time I was thirteen I knew Oblivion was inside my mind and I wanted it out. My old rules were gone. I felt panic when I should, my mind was spinning faster and faster out of control to joy or rage or despair. The headaches were brutal, the insomnia became a nightly battle, my days became polarized between having so much energy I was jittery and barely being able to crawl out of bed. The world was moving so fast and I couldn't tell anyone what was wrong.

Because there was one more rule about Oblivion. I knew the power of silence and the power of words. Naming Oblivion would give it a power I didn't want it to have. Speaking about it might make it that much worse.

And how do you explain to someone that you have a childhood nightmare inside your head?

I don't really remember much of the year I turned thirteen. It quickly spiraled down into a never ending cycle of days I just barely got through and exhaustion that got worse with time.

I don't remember the first time I cut though I figure it was for the same reason I would continue. I was intelligent. I knew I was walking that thin line of sanity and my toes were beginning to obscure it. When I cut in those early days it was for one reason alone.

I could draw my own. That pain wasn't in my head. It was real and when Oblivion started obscuring the line between reality and insanity and I was beginning to fear I would step over it on accident I could draw my own line and purge Oblivion from my blood for a time.

I had just turned fourteen the first time I slit my wrists. I don't remember why I did it. I remember even less of the first few months I was fourteen than I do of when I was thirteen.

I don't remember waking up in the hospital, or how long I was there before I was sent to the Home for observation. I know from my records I was there for two months but mostly I just remember being cold, being coherent only for brief periods of time while various doctors tried to figure out what was wrong with me and how to make me better.

I think I was on my fourth type of medication when I finally became coherent long enough to be able to decide to stop taking my pills. I found all sorts of creative ways to hide them, or to hold them in my mouth until I could spit them out somewhere. As I became more and more lucid for the first time in weeks I started fighting back the Oblivion that had taken over my mind and realized I could fight it. I started acting happy, energetic, alive. My doctors thought I must be cured by those magic little pills that were going anywhere but in me. I was released and after a little time life resumed it's normal retuine.

Hell, it only was a few months before my parents' overprotective overzealously worried attitudes cooled off.

I was fighting Oblivion now. It was hard but as I returned to highschool the reputation, that I was that crazy girl who tried to kill herself, actually helped me find others who fought Oblivion. We shared tips and fought together. I'd always had a darker inclination but I fell in love with the goth scene and with pounding music, and (when a story about the car wreaks next door turned into a group fieldtrip at two in the morning) forensic science.

When one of my friends found the photo of my old Halloween costume he renamed us the Knights of Oblivion.

Summers were hard for me in highschool. The KofO as we called ourselves when Knights of Oblivion became to much of a hassle to say, were often separated and had a hard time meeting then. Oblivion would press in close and I'd start cutting again. When my parents caught me the summer before my junior year I begged them not to send me back to the Home. I told them that the rest of the Knights were getting home in a week and that I'd be okay again.

I don't know if they understood what I said but I think they finally began to understand what I hadn't been saying. I think they might of understood that nothing that they had done so far had done as much good as my friends had in the past year.

We started talking more after that. I tentatively explained some things to them and answered questions I'd never answered before. It was hard, and I could see the pain in their eyes as they watch my hands move, the light reflecting off the scars on my wrists every so often.

But that understanding I offered them in exchange for their understanding gave us both a bit of firmer ground to stand on and I even learned to lean on them the following summers.

Life came with it's own drama's and just because I had Oblivion in my head didn't mean nothing else mattered. There were parties with beer and trying not to get caught by the police. I failed trying to get my drivers license twice before I finally passed the fricken test. There were boyfriends and after a rather awkward period in my junior year there were occasional girlfriends. There was homecoming and prom and movies with friends and waiting outside all night to get concert tickets and sneaking out of the house (easier for me than most) and well… I managed to be a teenager somehow.

Fighting Oblivion all the while.

The summer after senior year, after graduation and saying goodbye to the Knights was one of the hardest times I've ever had. Oblivion won a victory again. I tried killing myself again. I really don't remember why.

Maybe a part of me figured it would bring the Knights back.

But mostly I think the idea of facing life and Oblivion without them or anyone to fall back to was more than I was ready for.

My parents wanted to have me committed again. I was eighteen though and I refused to go. By the time they were trying to decide weather or not to fight my will I was on the rebound. I'd temporarily purged myself of Oblivion and I was feeling very alive.

I went to college in the fall and fell into an odd pattern. I would throw myself into work, using insomnia and caffeine to help me through the course loads from hell I signed myself up for. I'd work so hard that Oblivion couldn't form a foothold and party so hard I was too surrounded by people for it to attack.

Eventually I'd stumble and Oblivion would take hold. I'd find something to purge it. I'd cut, or go a week without eating, or throw myself down a flight of stairs, or have a one night stand with a guy from a bar I'd never been to before and never went back to again. Self destruction, causing my own self destruction, beat back Oblivion for awhile more and the cycle would start again.

Summers were harder. I could sign up for summer courses but even those didn't run constantly. I attempted suicide twice in the summer after my freshman year and once after my sophomore and junior years.

It was my senior year in college, when I was applying to graduate schools for my masters in forensics that I met Darcy Churchill. We went to the same seminar for potential students and hit it off right away. We both intended on taking credits over the summer and ended up roommates and eventually a couple.

She was the first one to notice the pattern I'd sported for the last four years. She was the first one to try to help me when Oblivion took hold. There were some long drunken nights when I told her everything and anything and woke in the morning sure she would leave me for saner regions only to find I'd fallen asleep in her arms and she was still rubbing her thumb gently across the scar on my wrist even in sleep, like somehow that loving touch would fade the scars and the pain that had made them.

I never really could tell her how much it really did just that.

It wasn't always good, life never is perfect, but for a little more than a year I had heaven and Oblivion couldn't have me.

It wasn't until the second year for our masters began that things would change. It wasn't until those girl's began turning up dead that fear would enter our world.

And it wasn't until I found myself sitting across a table in interrogation staring into a pair of steely pale blue eyes as he arranged photos in front of me with grim disgust and spoke those terrible terrible words that I knew Oblivion would always win in the end.

"Why did you kill those girls Miss Succito?" He asked softly. "Why did you kill Darcy Churchill?"


End file.
